SEWA Bharat - Business Growth Lead

About SEWA :

Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) is a movement of women workers in the informal economy, working towards self reliance and full employment. Over 48 years, 1.7 million women in India across 18 states have become members of this decentralised, grassroots movement. SEWA members have promoted over 140 collectively-owned social enterprises over 48 years of its existence.

SEWA Bharat has now setup an Enterprise Support System (ESS) to help these social enterprises scale, become sustainable and replicate their model. The ESS is supporting 5 enterprises in focus over a period of three years, one of them is Sarthak Pvt Limited.

Overview :

SEWA Sarthak Pvt Ltd is a network of ~100 business correspondents (BC's), majority women, based in Uttarakhand and Punjab and working with clients like SBI and Pay world. During the lockdown Sarthak's transaction volumes rose 1.5x and it has since maintained the increase. Sarthak's aim is to enable access to financial services to all women in the informal economy, through an approach of training women themselves to become financial agents. In addition to this, Sarthak runs a solar lights marketing, financing and servicing business in Bihar which is currently getting restructured.

Scope of Work & Tasks:

1) Leading Business Growth for Sarthak's Business Correspondence wing

- Scoping the current business and potential opportunity in existing SEWA locations

- Developing a strategy for business growth focussed on expanding within Uttarakhand and Punjab, and any other states where SEWA members are present

- Accountable for increasing revenue, getting Sarthak to be net profit positive, increase income earned per BC, increasing percentage of women agents

- Add more bank or non bank partners to which Sarthak can provide BC services

2) Managing Sarthak's Business Correspondence team:

- Responsible to manage the whole team managing business correspondents, including sales, operations, finance and accounts, CSPs themselves and any other function

- Restructure the team as needed to enable better performance

3) Fundraising for growth capital:

- Developing enterprises readiness for recieving debt, equity or other forms of non-grant capital

- Finding the right form of capital to support growth of Sarthak

Compensation & Location:

INR 80,000 onwards per month, commensurate with experience. Based in Delhi with an initial few months in Uttarakhand which is the base of most operations. We would also prefer candidates who are open to being based out of Uttarakhand permanently (at least one year)

Qualification Criterion:

Skill Sets

- Problem Solving

- Management Abilities

- Structured Thinking

- Strong planning and execution skills

- Ability to lead a team

Good to have

- Keen interest in spearheading a social enterprise and has past experience in similar space

- Right cultural fit for SEWA

- Candidate with prior entrepreneurial experience will be preferred

Non-negotiable:

- 4 years work experience ( this doesn't stop people with lesser experience to apply and will help to identify candidates that are real hustlers)

- Strong industry knowledge of microfinance and rural lending ( the knowledge can be simply through a consulting project of case competition also, need not necessarily be a work related stint)

- Graduation/ Post Graduation from a tier 1 institution ( preferred background in finance and management)